![]() It took Netscape about a minute.”įor the first time in history, Netscape proved that a company deeply embedded in the virtual world could be worth billions in the real one. At the time, The New York Times wrote that it was “ one of the most stunning debuts in Wall Street history,” and The Wall Street Journal noted that “it had taken General Dynamics 43 years to be worth $2.7 billion in the stock market. The company’s initial public offering set off a frenzy. According to Clark, there was even talk of a merger with Yahoo, another titan of the early internet. With the launch of Netscape Navigator, Jim Barksdale soon joined the company as CEO and immediately brought in huge investors like Hearst ( Popular Mechanics’ parent company) and Times Mirror. It’s a bullet-proof rock solid way of authenticating two end points and having a secure connection. “There needed to be an economic force driving, which meant that you had to be able to do business over the internet,” says Clark, “So, we created a secure way of doing transactions. The underlying technology of SSL still powers today’s security standard, TLS (Transport Layer Security). The technology established an encrypted link between browser and server, which allowed for privacy and consumer protection when submitting credit card numbers, stocks, or any other private information through the internet. Working with engineer Kipp Hickman, Netscape pioneered SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) Protocol. Besides the interface’s point-and-click simplicity, Netscape also provided unprecedented security. In mid-December 1994, the group released version 1.0, now known as Netscape Navigator. If the settlement was a low point, it came right before a crest. The proof are donations back to the school. “You should generate goodwill with students. “They tried to inhibit instead of enabling us,” Clark says. A December 1994 settlement forced Clark and Andreessen to pay millions and change the company name. ![]() It didn’t work.ĭespite their attempts not to run afoul of the university, Illinois sued the startup for intellectual property infringement. ![]() So, that was a challenge.” Netscape Rising Bina remembers: “We had to start from scratch and be ten times better. “I didn’t want a single line of code from, because that’s how we were going to stay out of court,” Clark says. For starters: The University of Illinois, where Bina and others still studied, held intellectual property rights to the original Mosaic as part of a university policy that’s still in effect today. They ran into roadblocks almost immediately. On April 4, 1994, Clark and Andreessen formed Mosaic Communications Corporation. “ was a first draft anyway by a bunch of students,” Clark says. But they were talented programmers and had made a revolutionary web browser once. Clark tells PM that he was initially skeptical, since it amounted to handing jobs to his partner’s friends. Out of ideas, Andreessen recommended that they simply hire the Mosaic team, who were all graduating and needed jobs. Nintendo was interested, but wanted a large ownership stake in Clark and Andreessen's venture. The Japanese gaming behemoth was on the cusp of announcing the new “Ultra 64,” known stateside as the Nintendo 64. Steve Kagan // Getty ImagesĪndreessen and Clark approached Nintendo first. Mosaic would become the foundation for almost all web browsing. There just wasn’t enough bandwidth,” says Bina, “Of course, I was completely wrong.” “At the time, I that this was a terrible idea because it was going to break the internet. Where there once was dull, blocky text, there was now eye-popping pixelated color photos. Through the use of color photos, sound bites, video clips, and, most notably, hyperlinks, it made web browsing a point-and-click affair. What made Bina’s and Andreessen’s creation so popular was that it did it in a “pleasurable” way, as described by Wired in 1994. These early web-surfing applications were sort of like index cards with tightly packed text information on a single page, and they only ran on certain platforms.Īfter the Illinois team launched Mosaic, it immediately became the web’s most popular browser because of its user-friendly design. “He gave me his sales pitch.on his vision of what the internet could be.”īrowsers, an software application used to locate and display webpages, did exist prior to 1993.
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